World Book Night

Fancy getting 48 free copies of a book you love, to distribute to people who want them?

World Book Night (two days after World Book Day) are giving away a million books (multiple copies of 25 selected titles), and yes, 48 of them could be through you. 20,000 volunteer book-givers – passionate readers who want to recommend a particular title – will receive 48 copies of one book from the WBN list, and will pass them on individually to people they think will enjoy them.

The rest of the books will be distributed by World Book Night staff, to hospitals, prisons and other institutions.

You won’t be able to wrap them in brown paper and string and leave them under the Christmas tree, because giver selection is not till January. World Book Night is on Saturday 5th March 2011, and the t’s and c’s state that givers will be throughout the UK and Ireland, so if I can bypass the mandatory postcode entry I’ll be making an application. Harder than you might think, though, to come up with 48 people you know who’d all love, say, the Heaney poems, or would take the necessary leaps of faith to make it through the early parts of Cloud Atlas. I’ve certainly recommended books to 48 people, but I don’t know if I’ve ever recommended the same book to 48 people before (except maybe the wonderfully funny Cold Comfort Farm, which most people handed back in confusion), and I’m not sure how genuine my “personal recommendation” will be, when the reason I’m giving the book away is because I have 48 copies of it and I’ve promised to.

I suppose when it comes down to it World Book Night is not so much a celebration of reading and the joy of sharing your personal favourites with your 48 most intimate friends, but a clever word-of-mouth marketing scheme by publishers. But hey, more power to their elbow. Not everything that makes money for someone else is wrong, and a million free copies of those 25 books floating about in the world aren’t going to make it a worse place for my children to grow up in.

Thinking of applying? What book would you choose? I can’t decide.

Update, 5th February: I’ve just heard that I was successful in my application for the Selected Poems of Seamus Heaney. Very happy to give copies away in response to begging emails.

If you look at the “next steps” link you’ll be able to find a bookshop local to you. If your application is successful, the books will be delivered to the shop you choose. Off you pop to collect them, and take it from there.

I’d prolifically recommend Cold Comfort Farm as well – the blight of so many ‘amusing’ books is self-consciousness, and this one is seamlessly devoid of a winning authorial presence. And of the list I’d join Alice in going for Carol Ann Duffy, who is the perfect centre along a line between John Betjeman and Jeanette Winterson and therefore all things to my 48 readers.